TinkerTour 2016: West Coast

If you read our last post on the upcoming TinkerTour, then you know we’re hitting the road in July! This year’s string of visits and workshops is shaping up to be pretty great all around.

We’ll start in San Diego on July 18th and make our way up to San Francisco, bump inland to Boise, then back to the shoreline up to Seattle over a 10 day trip, doing workshops and meetups for local Tinkerers. This year, we’re bringing our friends Fusion 360 and 123D Circuits to do meetups as well! The workshop schedule will be posted soon, but we plan on hitting: San Diego, LA area, San Francisco, Reno, Boise, Bend, Portland and Seattle! We’ll be working with some fantastic friends and organizations – from FabLabs to Libraries – and I can’t wait to get started.

Getting around on the East Coast by train was pretty easy – one can have breakfast in New York and be in Boston for lunch without ever getting in a car. Not so much on the West coast, so here’s the fun part: we’ve decided to make it a real road trip and do it in a 1975 Fiat Spider!

What..? Why?

Apart from the car’s general awesomeness, there are a few reasons why we’re not just renting a minivan.

Over the last few months, I’ve been working with local students from Leadership High School in San Francisco to brainstorm and design some custom parts for the car using Tinkercad, Fusion 360 and 123D Circuits. Components like the hood badges, turn signal bezels and a custom interior console are relatively simple to make (simple, but not always easy) using 3D models as the starting point for more manual processes like fiberglass and metal fabrication. Look for more posts on the individual projects later or follow my build thread on fiatspider.com for the whole process as it unfolds.

This year is also the 50th anniversary of the Fiat 124 Spider and there is a huge community of DIY car enthusiasts (not just Fiats) along the coast. We’re hoping the examples we create will be an inspiration to take their projects to a new level. At the very least we’d love to meet some of the car folks along the way.

I’m looking forward to showing what can be done with our products and a little elbow grease (or a lot), and as always completely stoked to meet our users face-to-face.

Stay tuned for more updates, including a full schedule in the next couple weeks. Meanwhile, here’s a teaser of the car in MeshMixer.